There are few things more dispiriting than corporate food—the food they serve you at corporate functions, meetings, conventions, retreats, seminars, team-building exercises. You know the events and you know the food. Both are about as unpleasant as a root canal: Necessary, at times, but not at all fun, and undignified in their own pointed way.
Corporate food is without a soul. It lacks the kind of vivid, animating qualities that we rightly associate with normal, well-cooked food. Corporate food is Potemkin food: it has all the appearances of actual food you know and love and want to eat, but once you get there and start investigating it it is without substance, empty, depopulated of the features with which we’ve come to associate familiar and enjoyable food. Corporate food is a lie.
If you are truly unlucky, at your meeting you get corporate food for all three meals. Some heartless managers and directors will force you to eat your lunch, dinner and breakfast from the corporate table. No going out to the diner across the hotel parking lot! No sir. You’re not even allowed to go to the Hardee’s over there next to US-11 and get yourself a sausage biscuit and some Hash Rounds. Hardee’s is not good food, the diner food isn’t either, but at least it has a vivial quality to it—it feels like an actual human being prepared it, anyway, with actual ingredients (and an actual third of a cup of rancid pork lard, but it’s better than nothing). Ah no, your fate is in Ballroom A: Your corporate food awaits. Go there, they won’t leave the steam tables out but for so long.
Corporate breakfast can be described in one overarching, all-summatory word: Pale. It is pale. There are no shades to it, nothing to distinguish it from any other part of itself. Think of the best breakfasts you’ve ever had: Mounds of hot, glistening scrambled eggs; bowls of boiling grits, salted and peppered and buttered and delicious; slabs of burnished toast, slathered in Irish butter and glistening strawberry jelly; steaming piles of sausage links, well-spiced and with those stunning veins of caramelized casing shot throughout; cup after cup of rich, bold coffee. Ha! Forget about those meals; they never happened—they were a rumor. This is your breakfast now: Flabby little curds of lukewarm eggs, a sausage patty that looks like it came out of a cardboard box, a piece of Wonder Bread. Do you want butter on that bread? Good luck—the little chiclets of butter they’ve set out for you, wrapped in thin tinfoil, those things are as hard as rocks. They rate about a 6.8 on the Mohs hardness scale. You’re not spreading that thing on your bread if your life depended on it; all you’re going to do is pulverize the slice of bread itself and leave much of the butter smeared on the imitation China. Console yourself with a cup of coffee that tastes like it came from a slightly upscale gas station, like a Wawa. Not “bad,” but not good either—not anything. Don’t even think about getting the oatmeal.
Corporate breakfast is bad. Corporate lunch may be worse. By this point you’re feeling a little indignant. Can’t you feed yourself? You have dim recollections of a grown man, in some other time and place, preparing and/or sourcing his own meals like a grown-ass adult. Was that you? You stare out of the hotel window, across the expanse of the miserable suburban diaspora, picking out the franchises from which you would gladly order a meal and sit down and at least sort of enjoy it: Chuy’s. Chili’s. Chipotle. Culver’s. Chick-fil-A. Wow, there are so many food places that begin with C. You never knew. In the sweet innocence of your freedom, you never took the time to really notice any of it, to enjoy it, to count just how many restaurants begin with C, and how many begin with D, all through the alphabet. If you could just get out there again, to freedom, to being free, you’d do it—you’d make the best of it this time, if just given one more shot. You wouldn’t waste your mealtime liberty like you did before. Alas, you’re not free. You never were. Disabuse yourself of such faulty evocations. Your corporate lunch awaits you downstairs in Ballroom A.
Corporate lunch is not pale, not exactly, but it is not colorful either. It is as if the color Pale woke up and said, “Today I am going to turn over a new leaf” and tried to do some colors, but because it is Pale, it can only ever get so far. Corporate lunch leans very heavily on the rice pilaf. Every corporate lunch has a pilaf somewhere on the lineup. A pilaf can be a magnificent dish: Done right, it elevates a simple grain, infusing it with flavor and principle— morassa' polō from Iran, say, or Afghani kabuli pulao, or the bastardized but still ethereal versions of “pilaf” in the Caribbean, all of them loaded with flavor and all of them excellent. Corporate pilaf is none of these things. It has, at best, a glancing familiarity with flavor. It may or may not have been in the vicinity of a salt cellar at some point, but you’ll never know. Are those flecks of parsley or cilantro in it? Could be either one, maybe. Or maybe not. Ah, what about the potatoes in the next chafing dish? These lovely chunks of floury carbohydrate, four-fifths cooked and bathed in some sort of gluey Alfredo sauce? Dig in. And this chicken—are these boneless chicken thighs? Somehow, someone back in the kitchen line figured out how to overcook chicken thighs. You didn’t think it was possible to suck all the moisture out of a chicken thigh, but you were so wrong. The proof is in front of you, right in this watery concoction that some desperately creative soul had the temerity to call a Romesco sauce.
Oh, you don’t want to be here, do you? Bad enough that you have to eat your lunch in public. But to have to choke down these sad little creations—washed down with a warm Coke or a warm mineral water—it’s too much, really.
There’s a burning sort of humiliation here. You’re a human being, for goodness’s sake. You have rights, and reasonable expectations. You have standards. Plus, the Geneva Conventions—didn’t they say something about this? Weren’t there specific protocols about rice pilafs? You’re half-certain there were, but your head is so swimmy now—the potatoes are going to work, satiating your body and brain into an Alfredo-soaked stupor. You continue eating. What else are you going to do? This is corporate food and you aren’t going anywhere.
One drowsy, sweaty nap on your hotel bed later, and it’s time for corporate dinner. Here’s where things get mixed up. If they’re making you eat dinner with the team, you’ll have two possibilities. The first is a dinner out somewhere—at some new restaurant in an urban center or modestly upmarket strip mall. The restaurant name will be two rustic nouns with an ampersand in the middle: Bark & Brook, Wheat & Thresher, Field & Smokehouse. If you’re lucky enough to actually dine at one of these places, you’ll get a bit of a respite from the bona fide corporate food of the last 24 hours: The meal at Wheat & Thresher won’t be “good,” exactly, not in the veridical sense, but it will at least be better, it will have been made to order and with at least a nominal dash of creativity by some chef who has dreams of one way moving to Miami or South Central.
More than likely, however, this food will be delivered to Ballroom A, ordered en masse and plopped back into the waiting chafing dishes. And as gently underwhelming as Wheat & Thresher is at the restaurant, it is all that more dismaying when served in this hated ballroom, hours after it was made. A pork chop from a trendy restaurant is probably mostly okay; a pork chop from that same restaurant, made at 3:45 P.M. and eaten at 6:50 P.M. after being heated by a Sterno for a few hours, is not at all good. Every interesting aspect of that food is slowly cooked away, and every unpleasant part of it is magnified and underscored. Go ahead and try some of the broccoli, too—why not? We’re all mortal and we’re all going to die some day. Look, another pilaf! And there’s some dessert, too—maybe it’s apple pie and maybe it’s peach pie, but you’re not sure one way or the other given the quarter-cup of cinnamon they dumped into it. Just lie back and think of England.
The one upshot to corporate food: When you arrive home you discover the sheer joy in simple, decent food, cooked well and fresh and eaten just after. That box of spaghetti in your pantry—it may have seemed boring and uninteresting before you left, but now you see all the possibilities of it, the limitless dishes you can create with just a little starch and a little heat. If nothing else, corporate food teaches you to re-appreciate good food. Don’t miss out on the chance to rediscover how to love food when it’s done right. It’s a long path to get there, through corporate food, but you’ll feel renewed coming out on the other side. After you sleep off the third day of potatoes, anyway.
Haha this is great! I will say, however, as a child of the 70s and 80s this kind of corporate food is far better than what I had to eat in school and college that was prepared by ARA! ARA used to provide all the “institutional” food, like for public schools, universities, hospitals, and prisons. Going through the line at the college dining hall to get ARA food really made you feel like you had something in common with New York’s inmates 😄 So nowadays when I’m eating corporate food it doesn’t bother me because I spent so much time eating worse! 🤢😂